The present invention relates to a fault processing apparatus and, more particularly, to a communication processing control apparatus having a duplex communication processing section in an information processing system.
As industrial classification becomes unclear and client services for 24 hours a day and 365 days a year are becoming popular, requirements for open systems, networking, and high reliability are increasing on the client side.
Under these circumstances, strong demands have arisen particularly for reliability of network control functions of various servers these days. Especially, requirements for non-stop operation are increasing together with the client""s need.
Examples of systems with such requirements are a horse racing betting system, an air traffic control system, an international network system of trading companies and financial agencies, and a disaster prevention system for earthquake or the like.
In a conventional information processing apparatus of this type, a duplex network management apparatus is used to effectively manage the network even when the network management apparatus malfunctions. More specifically, the network management system comprises a main management apparatus for normal network management and a sub-management apparatus for backup management. Each management apparatus has an inter-management-apparatus communication control section for exchanging management states, and also a management state storage section for storing management states.
In the information processing system having this arrangement, even when the main management apparatus malfunctions, it can be switched to the sub-management apparatus to continuously perform network management without damaging the management states.
However, in the above-described prior art, the following social problem may occur.
In the above-described prior art, when the main management apparatus malfunctions, the main management apparatus is switched to the sub-management apparatus. For this switching, fault processing by hardware (HW) or software (SW) is performed. For this reason, a fault processing time is required to switch the main management apparatus to the sub-management apparatus. Hence, the switching time from the main management apparatus to the sub-management apparatus is not zero.
The presence of switching time largely influences mission critical processing. In some cases, this may readily pose social problems due to system down.
It is an object of the present invention to provide a communication processing control apparatus and information processing system which eliminate the management apparatus switching time when a fault occurs.
It is another object of the present invention to provide a highly reliable communication processing control apparatus and information processing system which can properly continue processing even for mission critical processing.
In order to achieve the above objects, according to the present invention, there is provided a communication processing control apparatus for controlling data transmission between an arithmetic processing control apparatus and a network, comprising first and second communication processing means, made duplex and inserted into a duplex data transmission route, for performing the same processing, and data control means for adding CRC data to input data, and outputting the data to the first and second communication processing means, and simultaneously checking the CRC data contained in output data from the first and second communication processing means to detect a fault in the first and second communication processing means.